


like real people do

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [82]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, College, Fraternities & Sororities, Ghosts, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 13:38:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21180329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: “No one told me that you molest people in their sleep,” he mutters, trying to keep his voice quiet. Above him, Johnny grunts and turns over. The hand goes still.“You can see me,” a voice murmurs.“Yeah.” Steve sighs. “I can see you.”“How?”Steve’s been able to see dead people since he was four years old. But people don’t tend to respond well when children tell them that the old man across the street watering his lawn had a bullet through his head, so after the fourth therapist, Steve had learned that it was something best kept secret.“I’ve got the sight, man,” he says with a small shrug. “And look, I feel for you. You’re dead and I’m not, and that sucks, but unless you’re planning on doing something about it, I’d really appreciate it if you could stop feeling me up and let me get back to sleep.”





	like real people do

**Author's Note:**

> Day 25 of October. Prompts were: candy bowl, academia, poltergeist, senses, abnormal, fever dreams, and candy. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I know nothing about rushing a fraternity. I also know nothing about ghost sex. Just go with it.

Steve rushes the fraternity because it’s what’s expected of him. It was his dad’s fraternity, and his dad was the one who pulled all the strings to get him into the university in the first place, so that’s what he does.

He only half expects to get in. Doesn’t really _care_ about getting in. Doesn’t care much about college, period. And if he’s really honest with himself, there isn’t a whole lot that he does care about nowadays.

But he does, and then spends the next few weeks making it his life’s mission to spend college as drunk as they'll let him get away with. It’s great for the first few weeks. He goes to parties. He fucks pretty girls. He skips class in favor of smoking a blunt with the kid from one of his intro classes in the parking lot of the lit building.

It gets boring. He can hear Nancy’s voice in his head chiding him about his work ethic, telling him to think about his future. So he starts trying a little more. Stops cutting classes and starts spending time in the libraries. Skips a few parties in favor of late night cram sessions with a couple of the brothers.

That isn’t ideal either, but it does its job, quieting her voice lingering in the back of his head.

It’s not that he doesn’t talk to her. He sees her around. Sometimes he’ll join her and Jonathan at one of their geeky little soirees or get coffee with them before class. But he’s trying really, _really_ hard to not be that guy who’s hung up on his ex, so he does his best to limit the interaction.

The first time that he meets Billy Hargrove, it’s in the middle of the night. He’s stumbling back up the stairs to his room, half drunk with some girl’s lipstick smeared on his chin, when he collides with someone in the hallway. It’s dark, and he’s drunk, so he doesn’t really think much of it. Just mumbles his apologies and shuffles his way into his room.

He’s not quite asleep when he feels someone staring at him a good ten, fifteen minutes later. And look, he’s fucking tired. Tired and drunk and a little horny, but not so horny that he actually feels up to jerking it before one of the other guys come back upstairs. So he cracks his eyes open, sees the shadow standing above him, and says, “If you’re that scared of the dark you can bunk with me, I guess.”

It’s meant to be a tease, but he’s too tired to make it sound right so it just comes out flat, maybe a little whiny.

All the same, he doesn’t honestly expect anyone to take him up on it. It’s dark enough that he can’t make out the guy’s features, but he’s gotten a feel for the brothers by now. They’re not all the ‘no homo’ sort, but there are just some things that you don’t do. Getting into bed with another guy is one of them.

But after a moment of silence, a body slides under the covers next to him. It’s a tight fit, and Steve lets out a little oath of surprise, feeling muscles and skin and hair, before he gets himself under control and scoots back until his back is pressed up against the wall.

The guy’s breath is hot on his neck, which is a little uncomfortable, but it doesn’t smell or anything, so he thinks, whatever, and just throws an arm around a narrow waist.

“Don’t hog the covers,” he thinks he says, and then he’s drifting off into a dark, dreamless sleep.

When he wakes up the next morning, his night time guest is gone.

“Some kid died here in the eighties,” Henry is telling him. Steve’s got the bong in his lap, so he doesn’t say anything, just takes his hit and passes it on as the other freshmen chorus the typical “no way’s” and “you gotta be kidding me, man’s.”

“Yeah,” Henry says with a stoned smile. “Rumor has it that it was really bad. Like, an actual _murder_ bad. Blood and guts all over the place. They almost shut the place down.”

Steve blinks at him. He’s bored, and honestly too fucking sober for ghost stories.

“Did they ever catch who did it?” he asks, because that’s the next line in the script.

Henry grins wider. “Naw. Never did. Some say that his ghost haunts the place still, looking for _revenge_.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, then goes back to scrolling through his instagram, only half paying attention as the conversation plays out. He grabs a twizzler from the candy dish and sticks in his mouth.

He’s just starting to think about retiring for the night when something Henry says catches his attention.

“The hallway?” he asks.

“Yeah, man,” Henry tells him, taking the bong when it’s passed back his way. He takes a deep rip, and spends the next half a minute coughing up a lung before he goes on, eyes still watering. “Lurks in the upstairs hallway at night and scares the shit out of people when they come up to bed. It’s happened to me like, at least three times this semester.”

Steve is quiet, twirling the twizzler idly in his hands. He’s thinking about shadowy silhouettes on the landing of the stairs and the feeling of skin pressed against his in the dark. It’s been three weeks, and so far, nobody’s admitted to it.

“Weird,” he decides, and goes back to instagram.

Three days later, he wakes up in the middle of the night to a hand on his stomach.

He’s always been slow to wake, surfacing from sleep sluggishly and only managing to come back to life once he’s downed like sixteen ounces of coffee, so it takes him a minute to realize what’s happening.

The room is dark, moonlight filtering in through the curtains. He’s got three roommates this year, and he can make out most of their forms in the dark, huddled under blankets. Johnny’s snoring in the bunk above him and Jeff’s got a hand flung out across the pillow a few feet away. And if he squints, he can see Henry’s bunk isn’t empty either.

It could be another of the guys. Maybe one of the older ones, or a friend of a friend who stumbled into the wrong guy’s bed, but he doesn’t think so. The hand pressed against his stomach is squarish, masculine, with something cold and hard that feels like a ring on his fourth finger.

Whoever he is, he’s quiet, barely breathing as his knuckles slide over the soft skin of Steve’s belly. Despite himself, Steve shivers.

“No one told me that you molest people in their sleep,” he mutters, trying to keep his voice quiet. Above him, Johnny grunts and turns over. The hand goes still.

“You can see me,” a voice murmurs.

“Yeah,” Steve sighs. “I can see you.”

“How?”

Steve’s been able to see dead people since he was four years old. But people don’t tend to respond well when children tell them that the old man across the street watering his lawn had a bullet through his head, so after the fourth therapist, Steve had learned that it was something best kept secret.

“I’ve got the sight, man,” he says with a small shrug. “And look, I feel for you. You’re dead and I’m not, and that sucks, but unless you’re planning on doing something about it, I’d really appreciate it if you could stop feeling me up and let me get back to sleep.”

The hand flinches away from him like it’s been burned. Steve grunts in appreciation, and flips over, turning his back to the ghost. His dick’s at half chub now, which sucks, because when it comes down to it he’s not sure how he feels about ghost handjobs.

“Can I stay here?” the voice asks, and Steve hums, settling back into his pillow.

“Sure, bud,” he says, half asleep again already. “Just don’t hog the covers.”

He starts seeing the ghost around more. The first time that he sees him in the light, Steve just kind of assumes that he’s a guest from another frat or somebody’s date. He’s got that kind of look - bare chest, leather jacket, acid-washed jeans, and blonde curls that make the shitty mullet thing he’s got going for him look almost palatable. He has a pretty face with a chiseled jawline and a nice, red mouth. His eyes are the perfect shade of blue. In short, he looks like a guy who was made to do keg stands and make out with pretty girls in crowded hallways.

And then some drunk co-ed trips straight through him.

He looks almost _offended_, lip curling into a sneer before glancing Steve’s way.

Steve holds his gaze, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do? Pretend he didn’t see? Look away and go back to drinking monster mixed with shitty vodka?

Steve was a lot of things, but he wasn’t afraid of a little confrontation. And he _definitely_ wasn’t afraid of ghosts.

So, he salutes him with a solo cup, and goes back to the party, a prickle of awareness at the back of his neck for the rest of the night.

It doesn’t end there though. Steve will see him out of the corner of his eye when he’s heating up a hot pocket in the middle of the night, or bump into him outside of the bathroom in the mornings. And there are always the nights when he wakes up to the warmth of someone else in his bed.

He starts having dreams. They’re good dreams, the kind that you wake from sweaty and already halfway to coming, blankets twisted around hips and thighs. Each time he wakes up, hard and rutting into his mattress, he’ll feel the ghost’s eyes on him - sometimes from far away, and other times, when the warmth of him is still huddled close, when it’s someone else’s thigh that he’s riding instead of a goddamn mattress.

Midway through October, he gets sick. The bug is going around, and he spends four days cooped up in his room coughing his brains out, reeling from the fever. The guys find other places to sleep because they don’t want to be exposed to his sick ass, so no one is there to see Steve murmur feverish, sleep-addled words to empty air.

“My name is Billy,” the ghost tells him on the third night of his fever. He’s curled around Steve like a blanket, one hand on his hip and the other in his hair. It’s soothing, and yeah, maybe a little gay, but Steve hasn’t had someone stroke his hair since he was five years old. Not like this.

“Billy,” he murmurs, still hot and dizzy from the fever.

Billy curls closer. Steve can feel him pressed all the way down his back. He’s still in the leather jacket, and Steve kind of wants to ask him if he can even take it off, but doesn’t know if it’ll come off as insensitive.

When he wakes up on the fourth day, feeling most of the way better, Billy is still there.

Steve takes a long moment to look at him. His eyes are closed, blonde curls loose across the pillow. He looks… pretty. Like he belongs in someone’s bed. Like he belongs in this bed, even.

“You’re staring,” Billy murmurs, eyes still closed.

“It’s weird,” Steve tells him. “I usually see, y’know, what a body looked like when it died. But with you, you just look normal.”

Billy squints his eyes open, looking up at Steve through slitted eyes. He looks disarmingly human, grumpy and sleep rumpled.

“You’ve been listening to the stories, haven’t you?” he asks, a little smirk playing around the corners of his mouth. He shifts, and Steve watches the morning light play over the muscles of his stomach. When Steve looks back up at him, the smirk has grown wider.

“Maybe,” Steve admits. “So you’re telling me you weren’t murdered.”

“Nope,” Billy says with a shrug. “Heart attack. Overdosed on shitty coke and died in my sleep.”

“Oh.” Steve blinks. “So you-”

“Am not waiting for my murderer to return so I can get my revenge?” Billy snorts. “No.”

Steve thinks about asking him why, then. He’s always wondered. Ghosts must linger for a reason, because if everyone who’d ever died was still here, he’d be overrun. Steve would see ghosts everywhere he looked. They would be a neverending flood, instead of the occasional spook on the side of a highway or an ex-girlfriend’s best friend haunting the pool she’d drowned in.

Barb might not have been his first ghost, but she was definitely one of the most memorable.

“Shift over,” he says eventually. “I’m going back to sleep.”

Obligingly, Billy rolls over, making room for Steve to wedge himself back against the pillows.

Predictably, it’s Halloween when things escalate. Steve is drunk, more drunk than he’s been in a good long while, and he’s spent the last few hours with a lap full of warm redhead who squirmed in all the right ways when he sucked on her neck. He’s dressed as Dracula, because it’s what Henry had in his closet, and the shitty fake blood has dried weird and itchy against his chin.

But when he tries to bring her back up to the room, something stops him. It’s a force, casual and cold, and Steve might not see Billy, but he knows that it’s him. Knows, somehow, that he’s pissed.

He takes the girl’s number and then lets her go home with her friend.

“I just want you to know that being a cockblock in the eighties might have been cool, but in 2019, it’s kind of fucking rude,” he tells Billy when he gets back to the room. The party is still in full swing downstairs, and he can feel the bass thumping through the floorboards.

“It was rude in the eighties, too,” Billy says from where he’s sprawled out on Steve’s bed. His eyes had been fixed on the sagging mattress above him, but when Steve takes a seat at his feet, they snap to him.

Steve narrows his eyes. “Then what gives?”

Billy watches him for a moment. In that moment, he looks almost dangerous, anger simmering restlessly between them. Then, he shifts upright on the bed, pulling his feet out from under Steve’s thighs. He moves closer, until he’s right next to him, and then he crawls the rest of the way into Steve’s lap.

Steve blinks at him, hands going to his hips automatically. His dick hasn’t quite gotten the memo that the person in his lap isn’t actually alive, so when Billy shifts against him, it responds accordingly.

Steve hisses. “What are you doing?”

Billy, very pointedly, rocks his hips forward. It makes Steve twitch, his mouth falling open on a gasp.

“What does it look like?” he asks.

“It looks like I’ve got a ghost trying to ride my dick,” Steve tells him, trying to sound cocky, and failing miserably. His voice is too breathy, too wanting.

Billy hums, rocking forward again.

“Can you even come?” Steve gasps, fingers tightening around Billy’s denim-clad thighs.

Billy chuckles darkly. “I’m willing to find out if you are.”

Steve groans when Billy reaches between them, palming his dick through his pants. Billy makes a noise of quiet appreciation, stroking him through the fabric, and Steve lets his head tip back.

It’s not that he hasn’t thought about it. The dreams have haunted him for weeks now and waking up day after day to Billy, pressed warm and eager against him, have lead to some really interesting fantasies.

“Fucking ghost dick,” he murmurs when Billy gets his pants undone.

Billy snorts, peeling himself out of his leather jacket. Steve watches with interest as it vanishes the moment it leaves Billy’s hands, and then Billy is there, all warm tan skin, and his mouth is on Steve’s throat.

He stops thinking about the jacket.

It turns out that ghosts can, in fact, have orgasms. Which is honestly pretty ridiculous, but he’s not complaining, because Billy is gorgeous and vocal and has some really fantastic fucking hands.

When it’s over and they’re lying panting in the covers, Billy turns over. His face is doing something strange. Historically, Steve isn’t the best at reading expressions, but he’s been getting better at reading Billy’s.

“Can I stay?” Billy asks, and it’s tender and a little bit vulnerable. Nothing like the face that Billy probably showed the world when he was still alive. In death, he’s made honest.

Steve hums, smiling a little in the dark. “Just don’t hog the covers.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] like real people do](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25161448) by [morph_reads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morph_reads/pseuds/morph_reads)


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